February 6, 2010

This is the second in a three four part series. The first is available here and the third here. I’ll link to the fourth once it’s up.

So, last time I talked about the ways that using the concept of “ignorance” furthers racism, classism, colonialism, etc, and misdirects us away from the bigger issues. This time, I want to talk more about how the discourse of ignorance serves to let people off the hook once their transphobia has been called out.

Last time, we established that some people are culturally pre-defined (stereotyped) as ignorant, and others as knowledgeable. For those labeled “ignorant” with a broad brush, it’s a moral failing, a character flaw, a mark of deficiency, and a legitimation to dominate them–“backwards,” “illiterate,” “primitive,” “brutish,” “hillbilly,” “uncivilized,” etc. For them, then, using the concept of “ignorance” doesn’t get them off the hook, doesn’t forgive their actions, doesn’t make them seem OK, just bigoted. If their transphobia is rooted in “ignorance,” it becomes simply one more justification for marginalizing them.

However, for those defined as knowers and those one is otherwise unwilling to dismiss (e.g. family)–those who have no risk of being demonized as “ignorant and stupid”–the story is very different. Can you imagine the following being written about some “hick” who harassed you the other day, or the teenager who said “that’s a dude” about me last weekend?

…If I’m right, that’s an example of transignorance: The assumption that despite my statements, I am female because that’s what they always thought; and that therefore, I should feel the same toward my body as they do about theirs. Consider the ratio of folks whose sex and gender do/not match and it’s a reasonable assumption, just incorrect.

So while ignorance as a systemic trait is despicable, ignorance-in-this-one-area is A-OK, because it’s non-essential knowledge, knowledge you *couldn’t possibly expect everyone to have already, or find on their own*.

Obviously, this ties into it’s-your-job-to-educate-us. Which brings me to the absurd example that drove me to finally write these posts that have been bouncing around in my brain since before I even started this blog. As y’all may remember, I’m in a Women’s and Gender Studies graduate program. This term, I’ve related trans issues, and/or being trans, to the issues at hand almost every week. The very first week of class, I mentioned how I hated the discourse of non-binary gender that goes “man, woman, transgender” instead of “man/woman, cis/trans.” I was talking to a classmate about something outside of class, and when I mentioned something that said I was trans, she said “I thought you were a woman!”

Yuh-huh.

Her justification? That she “didn’t know the discourse.” She told me that she was offended that I characterized her words as transphobic, because she wasn’t phobic, just didn’t know the lingo. She just didn’t know!

Yuh-huh.

In an unrelated incident, I’d been working at [retail establishment] for five or six months. A co-worker in another department had gotten my pronoun right all this time, seen other people get my pronoun right all this time, and thought nothing of using “she” until, after five months he found out I was trans and called me “he” to a customer. When I confronted him? He ‘didn’t know what I wanted to be called.’ Riiiiiiight.

They both knew. And they both had the tools to find out, if they really didn’t know, if they’d wanted to. But see, once you’re in the position to not be labeled ignorant, “not knowing” trans things is perfectly innocent. It’s totally optional, because any hurt you inflict in the mean time a)isn’t important, and b)will be washed away by the magic of intent. Except it’s not innocent. I would actually go further than Queen Emily when she says

I don’t care that you’ve never met a trans person before, I don’t care that you’ve never had a women’s studies course before, I don’t care that you’ve never had a trans 101–you can find out what we want to be called from the worst transphobic screeds and jokes. Making fun of trans people is a widespread cultural trope, it’s not something you’ve never heard of: (warning, transphobia abounds in this section. Skip past the quotes if you need to.)

Yes, there we go again, cis people making fun of the dumbed-down explanation we made for them as though it was the depth of our thought. “Woman trapped in a man’s body,” hur hur hur.

But you know what? You know that person who says that (to use language I *hate*) “identifies” as a woman. And you know that invalidating someone’s self-concept isn’t nice.

Even Paul Scott knows what we want to be called, and knows that he’s invalidating our identities–and even from him, you can figure it out:

…He said his mandate would be in place even for those who had completely undergone sex reassignment surgeries.

“That’s who you are. You can have cosmetic surgery or reassignment surgery but you are still that gender,” he said.

The clear implication? That we disagree. There’s no other way this makes any sense. And as Zoe Brain notes in the comments on this article (scroll down)

Because he’s not just ignorant. It’s not that he hasn’t been told about intersex conditions. Comments have been made on his blog by biologists and medics – which he’s deleted so they don’t get seen. E-mails from scientists and educators on this area have been sent. He ignores them. He just needs a scapegoat to demonise, and this group is perfect for the job.

…Apparently, Chastity’s gender confusion has confused her and now she realizes that she has been living a lie. She wasn’t really a lesbian, but a Sonny trapped in a Cher’s body. So, after a little plastic surgery, a shave, and a haircut, Chastity will no longer be Chastity the lesbian, but Chaz the artificial man. The gender “experts” tell us it is perfectly normal and that anyone who would question it is not normal but hateful, judgmental, and intolerant.

Could it be any more clear what Chaz wants to be called? Could it be any more clear that Richman, like Scott, is familiar with “the lingo”? And if right-wingers like these know what we want to be called, and if even five minutes listening to them will tell you what we want to be called, then you knew, too.

You may not know the ontology behind our claims to reality, you may not know what the word “ontology” means, you may not know our critique of the sex/gender distinction or of biology. But you know how we see ourselves, you know that implying we’re not really women/men is offensive, and thus that claiming to be more real (in any of the myriad ways that cis people do this) is offensive.1 At some point, almost all of you made a conscious choice to disrespect us. Misgendering and ungendering1 transsexual folks has nothing to do with terminology, and everything to do with expressing contempt towards us and superiority over us–no matter how strongly one denies it.

Since you’ve seen us ridiculed and objectified all over the place, and there’s easy internet access, you’ve had the prompt to go check on how to be respectful, and the means to do so. And clearly, my readers, you have chosen to do so, but I suspect that most of you, like me, and like the country at large, had a long history of acting dismissive and superior before you did so.

Trans education so often focuses on glossaries and definitions. A lot of cis people are hungry to know the right language, but they want it not because they don’t actually know the terms or couldn’t look them up quickly and painlessly, but because they want to be able to pass themselves off as not transphobic without doing any of the soul searching that would reveal their transphobia to them. They want to look not-transphobic, whether because it has social value or because it makes them feel better about themselves, or maybe even because they don’t want to hurt people/to be tolerant, but they have no desire to decenter themselves, lose their ontological privilege, and eradicate transphobia inside themselves and in society.

Framing the issue as ignorance has allowed cis people to ask for more glossaries, more definitions, more trans 101–and to silence challenge and accountability. It’s played along with privileged cis people’s delusions of innocence, it’s let them get away with their history of complicity, at the same time that it has justified their sense of superiority over other oppressed groups. It’s kept up the demand to “tell our stories,” and tell them depoliticized, it’s heaped cis people’s work onto trans people. And it condones cis people’s ongoing transphobic acts, even when they clearly knew better.

It’s time for a new frame.

Up Next:

Part 3: Cis Denial, Self-Knowledge, and Sexist Epistemology

Part 4: Transphobia as Authoritative Knowledge Claims

1: edit 3:30 CST.
EDIT 2-24-10 to account for addition of a fourth part to series.

This is the first in a three four part series. The second is here and the third here. When the fourth is posted and written, I’ll link it here.

But what does it mean that this–“ending ‘ignorance'”–is our battle cry?

“Ignorance” calls up two images. The first image is of homophobia and transphobia, hate, bigotry, etc.–the one intentionally referenced by HRC, NGLTF, GLAAD, et al. OK. But what about the other image, or other part of the image, raised by the word–of the uneducated, elderly, rural or working class, poor, people of color or (to use the busted, racist and classist logic of the image) “white trash,” Fox-News watching Red-staters or people from the “third world” who need to be “civilized” (to, again, use the logic of the image).

Huh. What about that?

These are, of course, the people hegemonic liberal discourse teaches us to assume are homophobic, transphobic, racist, etc.–not health insurance executives, doctors, therapists, the police, Women’s Studies PhD’s, queer theorists, anthropologists, biologists, journalists, cis LGB folks, or (to be US-centric) policy wonks writing the REAL ID act, the FDA, the Social Security Administration, the State Department (in charge of passports), etc. Not the people with a lot of knowledge, education, and power. That is to say, not the people in charge, not the “good people,” not, oh say, you.

I’ll be honest–the people who transphobically harass me on the street are, by an overwhelming margin, young cis black men culturally pre-defined as “ignorant”. I’m not making that up, I can give you numbers if I have to. But the people who’ve harassed me at work, the people who’ve trans bashed me, and the people who’ve groped me (because I’m trans and female, not those who presume I’m cis) are all white (and cis) to a person–not all male, not all straight, of varied educational, class, and regional backgrounds, but all white (and that’s not representative of the demographics where I’ve worked). Any number of people from my educational institution have said highly transphobic shit to me or in my hearing–that is, all highly educated, socially pre-defined as knowledgeable, generally middle/upper class–and who does that is not strongly distributed by race, age, or whether they’re prof or student.** But the people who make the decisions and form the arguments that fuck with my life the most have a disproportionate amount of privilege, education, and power.

Targeting the ones that get culturally pre-defined as “ignorant” might be tempting, because their offenses are frequently the most highly visible, and (relatedly) least culturally sanctioned, but it’s those culturally pre-defined as “knowledgeable” that do me the most damage, and thus, through a privilege+power rubric, are most transphobic. Who’s worse, the most “ignorant” “redneck” (supposedly) embodying every awful anti-rural stereotype, or J Michael Bailey, who has a PhD and sits in the halls of knowledge?

So when we construe transphobia as about “ignorance,” not only have we engaged with classism, racism, and colonialism, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot and let the worst offenders off the hook.

Hell yeah, it’s an insult. Well, that is, so long as you’re unwilling to give up on cis supremacy.

*Obviously, I mean this in the un-reclaimed, insulting sense of the word.

(Also, I’d like to note, that the OP claims that PHB commenters and bloggers would all stop calling trans people trans if we asked them to. I call BULLSHIT, there’s no way they would honor that, they’d make jokes about how ludicrous this request was.)

November 11, 2008

That’s right, I’m not upset about prop 8. Consider this a calling out, if you need to.

It’s not that I’m happy about it–I’m not–or that I don’t think it’s a bad thing–it is–or something that will have (at least in the short term) a lot of bad consequences for a lot of people–it will–or a setback to the “LGBT” (by which we mean CLGB) movement–it is.

It’s that last one, see.

I’m sick of the politics of racism and exclusion, the politics of classism and transphobia, the politics of privilege. I’m sick of the politics that lead to racist violence of any kind, but against black queer people? Fuck you and you privilege too.

I’m sick of the politics of a movement that lead to two white gay men trapping me against a wall and punching me in the face for being a trans woman*. I’m sick of the politics that told them they would get away with it, right in front of a gay bar, at a trans event with approximately twenty witnesses. By the way, while people did intervene on my behalf, and the perpetrators were clearly surprised by that fact and, ultimately, they *did* get away with it. I’m sick of the politics that told the bartenders & bouncer that they could pretend they didn’t see it, despite clear evidence to the contrary, so that they could avoid any accountability. Which they did. I’m sick of the organizers of the event getting praised for how much they did about it–putting out a statement a full three weeks after I’d asked them to, only in response to a bunch of cis people asking them on my behalf, only one week before the next dance, and deciding to do what they thought best without any real attempt to collaborate with me or my advocates to form a game plan. I’m sick of the politics that sets the bar so low for accountability, trans misogyny, and anti-violence work that that’s admirable. I’m sick of it.

So, what I mean is–in that kind of a climate, how could they not have expected to get away with it? Every indication they had said that there would be some protests and maybe they’d have to say they were sorry at the worst, but that in the end they’d walk away unharmed, their violence and/or negligence done with no need for punishment, restitution, or further scrutiny. And certainly, no one’s denouncing the organizers for, say, not having a plan in place to deal with potential violence before it happened, or claiming the party to be “For trans men and trans women and their chasers, queers and allies, movers and/or shakers”–with no consciousness of how that might impact trans women. No one’s denouncing the other attendees for not stopping to ask why a trans woman(ish person)* in a miniskirt and fishnets was talking to the cops–for not realizing that that ain’t happening if things are ok.

I’m sick of the politics of a movement where, when I speak of the attack to cis people, particularly white but also POC, they’re *shocked*, when I tell it to white trans people & trans male spectrum POC, they’re (generally) not shocked but they are surprised, and when I tell it to trans women of color they say ‘OMG ME TOO.’ OK, this is hardly a scientific survey, and it’s definitely an oversimplification. But there’s only been one group of people, about six people, I’ve met who expected it, who, when I told them, they told me stories about the (raced) trans misogyny they’ve experienced from the hands and mouths of cis gay men–to the point of saying that gay men were “the worst” and that where they got trans misogynistically harassed the most was in Boystown (a predominantly white, upscale, cis, gay neighborhood–which has the vast majority of Chicago’s queer resources) by gay men. (They didn’t mention racial dimensions, whether because I’m a white stranger (likely) or because they don’t analyze it that way or some other reason.)

I’m white. I’m not trying to claim that somehow my white privilege hasn’t been playing out here, or to subtly identify myself as not-white or less-white. What I mean is that I can’t stand the ways in which white queers and cis queers, and particularly white cis queers, maintain a silencing denial about violence that is, frankly, endemic. Violence which they make possible through subtle means, like, say, putting all the LGBT resources in an expensive, white, cis part of town. No one should be able to say “me too” to that violence, but no one should have to be so excited about being able to talk about it, either.

Your “shock” is silencing. It says “your reality is strange and foreign. your experiences must be exceptions, isolated, one time experiences. your experiences aren’t something we could expect given other circumstances.” It tells us that we’ll be supported if we talk about violence coming from the “right people” but if it’s coming from the “wrong people,” then either you won’t believe us, or you will but you’ll be too caught up in your own shit to be supportive, and in either case you won’t understand yourself as complicit. Your shock makes my experience strange so you don’t have to interrogate your normal. Your shock says “violence happens out there, not here.” Maintaining the safety of your space requires my silence.

To return to the present moment–

I know, Truth Wins Out and PFAW put out statements condemning the blaming-of-black-people, and HRC, well, they linked it on their blog. Both statements put the racist violence out in the open and condemn it. The PFAW statement is actually quite good, and brings up the need for white LGBT activists to 1)do outreach to black communities, neither writing them off nor taking them for granted, and 2)to work for black folk as well, on issues like the minimum wage. But it doesn’t draw attention to the larger historical context of white queer betrayal of queers of color, and in particular trans women of color, or the history of the white CLGB movement’s use of racism and transphobia to achieve its ends, and the potential impact therein. The interplay between white and cis supremacy orchestrated by HRC in the formation of NCTE, for example:

Being that we were only a few months from the 2002 midterm elections, and the ALC was happening in late September, one of the provisos for our invite was that we keep it secret until after the event concluded.

The meeting concludes on a high note, we go back to Marietta to do the post mortem debriefing, cross check our notes, and we go back to Louisville to begin working on the most important Transgender 101 presentation in U.S. history.

But that Power Point presentation Dawn and I created for that Transgender 101 session is still on my computer because a Caucasian transgender leader leaked the details to her paymasters at HRC.
…
Once my tears dried, I began to get angry as I began to piece together the details of what happened and who leaked the info that killed the transgender community’s best chance to wean itself from dependence on the gay community and HRC’s control.

A few weeks later I got my answer. The Caucasian transleader who leaked the details of that meeting to HRC announces the formation of NCTE.

I say that this is an interplay of white and cis supremacy, rather than just white trans racism, because HRC was so clearly playing white trans people and black trans people against each other through, basically, bribery, to maintain its power. I’m angry at the person-who-Roberts-doesn’t-name-so-I-won’t-either’s racist and short sighted betrayal, a betrayal of every fucking one of us, the kind of betrayal that makes me shake if I let myself feel it, but it’s still only a result, and only one result, of HRC’s divide and conquer strategies.

This post is getting kind of long and convoluted for the thread of my argument, but it’s this: winning on 8, with the same strategies, with the same people, without both outreach and accountability to POC, would have been a hollow victory, and I’m so over our strategy of pursuing a specific goal at all costs, what Tobi callswinning to lose. The whole post is worth reading, but I’m just going to pick out an out-of-context tidbit:

Word came down from above that we were not allowed to use the words “bisexual” or “transgender,” or even the term “same-sex marriage.” The focus groups had shown that swing voters respond better to phrases like “gays and lesbians” and “gay marriage.”
…
As huge as they were, I didn’t feel that the potential short term gains were not [sic] worth the long term implications of perpetuating biphobia and transphobia. Indeed, I saw concrete results of that strategy just a couple years later. We were preparing to get gender identity non-discrimination, but were aware of a well organized opposition. Calling out to our base – the no on 36 voters – we found a disappointingly small proportion were supportive of and aware of the issue. I can’t help but see the connection between the decision not to mention trans people in previous LGBT campaigns, and the lack of awareness our electoral base had of trans people’s mere existence.

Losing on prop 8 denies real rights to real people, and keeps the political debate at an unacceptably low bar. But ultimately, I have to wonder if success might have denied more rights than a loss in the long run, compared to alternative strategies of the sort proposed by Beyond Marriage. As Nancy D. Polikoff writes in the Utne Reader,

The most contested issue in contemporary family policy is whether married-couple families should have “special rights” not available to other family forms. Excluded families include unmarried couples of any sexual orientation, single-parent households, extended-family units, and any other constellation of individuals who form relationships of emotional and economic interdependence that do not conform to the one-size-fits-all marriage model. No other Western country, including those that allow same-sex couples to marry, creates the rigid dividing line between the law for the married and the law for the unmarried that exists in the United States.

I propose family law reform that would recognize all families’ worth. Marriage as a family form is not more important or more valuable than other forms of family, so the law should not give it more value. Couples should have the choice to marry based on the spiritual, cultural, or religious meaning of marriage in their lives; they should never have to marry to reap specific and unique legal benefits. I support the right to marry for same-sex couples as a matter of civil rights law. But I oppose discrimination against couples who do not marry, and I advocate solutions to the needs all families have for economic well-being, legal recognition, emotional peace of mind, and community respect.

I’m sick of politics about marriage that ignore the neo-liberal capitalist domination inherent in US marriage law–

Without question, civil marriage enhances the “welfare of the community.” It is a “social institution of the
highest importance.” French v. McAnarney, supra. Civil marriage anchors an ordered society by
encouraging stable relationships over transient ones. It is central to the way the Commonwealth identifies
individuals, provides for the orderly distribution of property, ensures that children and adults are cared for
and supported whenever possible from private rather than public funds, and tracks important
epidemiological and demographic data.
…
Tangible as well as intangible benefits flow from marriage. The marriage license grants valuable property
rights to those who meet the entry requirements, and who agree to what might otherwise be a burdensome
degree of government regulation of their activities.…ejecting claim for equitable distribution of property
where plaintiff cohabited with but did not marry defendant);…(government interest in promoting marriage would be “subverted” by recognition of “a
right to recover for loss of consortium by a person who has not accepted the correlative responsibilities of
marriage)

Marriage is not always good for people. It is not always chosen freely. It is not always being prohibited, or discouraged–frequently it’s a government attack on women of color:

Healthy Marriages Grand Rapids received $990,000 from the federal government in 2003 to “facilitate the understanding that healthy marriages between parents is [sic] critical to the financial well-being of children, …increase the number of prepared marriages among low-income adults, and decrease the divorce rate among low-income adults.” The program coordinates local public media campaigns plugging marriage as well as relationship counseling classes, many offered by faith-based providers.

It is precisely this emphasis on marriage as a cure for economic woes that worries many welfare recipients and advocates. According to Liz Accles at the Welfare Made a Difference National Campaign, “Marriage promotion is problematic for many reasons. It is discriminatory. It values certain families over others. It intrudes on privacy rights. The coercive nature of this is lost on a lot of people because they don’t realize how deeply in poverty people are living.” Accles says that adequate educational opportunities, subsidized child care, and real job skills and opportunities are the answer to the financial concerns of women on welfare. She joins many domestic violence counselors in saying that marriage education funded by government coffers and administered via faith-based providers and welfare case workers is at best a waste of taxpayer money, and at worst pushes women deeper into abusive relationships that may end in injury or death.

In Allentown, Pa., a program called the Family Formation and Development Project offers a 12-week marriage education course for low-income, unmarried couples with children. Employment services are offered as part of the program, but only to fathers. In its application for federal funding, the program set a goal of 90% of the participating fathers finding employment. No such goal was set for the mothers. According to Jennifer Brown, legal director at the women’s legal rights organization Legal Momentum, which filed a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services, “What we fear is that this kind of sex stereotyped programming–jobs for fathers, not for mothers–will be part of marriage promotion programs funded by the government.”

Experts at Legal Momentum are concerned that the administration is diverting scarce funds from proven and effective anti-poverty programs and funneling the money into untested marriage-promotion programs. They say there is little information about what is happening on the ground, making it difficult to determine what activities have been implemented.

Feminist economists point out that the mid-1990s welfare reform law served larger economic interests by moving women out of the home and into the work force at a time when the economy was booming and there was a need for low-paid service workers. Now that the economy is in a recession, the government has adopted a more aggressive policy of marriage promotion, to pull women out of the work force and back into the home. According to Avis Jones-DeWeever, Poverty and Welfare Study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “We are talking about putting $1.5 billion into telling women to find their knight in shining armor and then everything will be okay.” (link)

And people wonder why black folks might not all be in lockstep in support of (gay) marriage. Maybe because it’s a racist agenda in the first place.

Marriage discourse that focuses on the lionization of marriage in a climate where the federal government is trying to force poor (black) women into abusive marriages and out of the workforce, discourse that legitimizes the denial of economic benefits to unmarried poor women and women fleeing domestic violence is absolutely unacceptable. I think it’s possible to organize coalitions around marriage (around what Tobi calls relationship recognition, but the point is the white CLGB community isn’t doing it, because it would implicate them in racist and classist oppression.

Tobi writes about how the (now-overturned) California marriage system potentially victimizes queer survivors of domestic violence/IPV:

It’s widely reported that the recent marriage decision in California does not create a residency requirement to get married. That means that someone could travel to California, get married, and go home. However, California DOES have a residency requirement for divorce. That’s where the trouble is.

If you’re home state doesn’t recognize your new marriage, then chances are they won’t allow you to get divorced there. …”States with civil unions or comprehensive domestic partnerships… also may allow married same-sex couples to divorce, but each of those states …has a one-year residency requirement.”
…
So what happens if you don’t live in one of those states and you and you’re partner are ready to leave your California-made marriage? Without moving to one of those states and waiting a year to gain residency — YOU CAN”T GET DIVORCED.

This has some obvious and serious legal repurcussions. And recognizing that abuse does indeed exist in queer communities, one can imagine the difficulties of not being allowed to divorce your abusive partner. Not being allowed to dissalow your abusive partner hospital visitation, medical power of attorney, or other such benefits of marriage.

While I’m sure this was an oversight, it clearly demonstrates a lack of forethought on the part of those drafting the bill–and “lack of forethought” is not uncaused, natural, or blameless. Do you think that, say, INCITE would make that mistake? What does it say about white CLGB marriage politics that this went unnoticed?

Earlier, Tobi wrote about the transphobic limitations of Oregon’s Domestic Partnership law:

the domestic partnerships are only for “same-sex” couples only. Why? There are a number of bi and straight “opposite-sex” couples who would rather avoid marriage — either for financial, political, or ideological reasons — why deny them the opportunity to get a domestic partnership. Especially the many straight queerspawn who do not want to be married while their parents cannot. Now they have to choose between taking marriage while their parents are relegated to a separate and unequal institution, or having no relationship recognition while their parents get a domestic partnership.

Then there’s the whole other issue of creating a new government institution that is based on people’s gender. That means that there is one more place where the rights you can have will depend on your ability to prove that you are the gender that you say you are. And that puts transpeople in a vulnerable place. If your someone can “disprove” your gender, then they could annul your domestic partnership. And while that would also end up “proving” that you’re eligible for a marriage, it very well may be too late. A transperson would just be out of luck if their partner “disproved” their gender in order to annul their domestic partnership as a tactic in a custody battle. Of course, all of these things could happen to a transperson in a marriage. But why do we have to include all of the issues of institutionalized transphobia in the relationship recognition system that we wrote?

We should remember that this bill doesn’t hurt “opposite-sex” couples and it doesn’t take away any rights from transpeople, but there’s absolutely no reason to leave them out….I and several other activists pointed this out to Basic Rights Oregon (BRO) two years ago, just before the last bill failed. We were told that this problem would be fixed next time, but aparently nobody took notes. By the time it was discovered this time around (i.e. I pointed it out, again), the bill language had been written

At one level, it’s an oversight. But again, if they’d been on it with their coalitional politics, it wouldn’t’ve happened. It didn’t slip past Tobi, it wouldn’t’ve slipped past me. It leaves open possibilities for transphobic discrimination that could easily have been closed, completely pointlessly.

I hope my point is clear: fixing relationship recognition is incredibly important, but this isn’t the way to do it, and if a setback were to cause us to change course, rather than dive headfirst into the same goddamn wall one more time, then I’m not shedding too many tears. This fight wasn’t about getting rid of discrimination–it was about getting one group of people into the privileged class.

Marriage rights are frequently equated to employment non discrimination. The irony is, of course, that there is a lot of similarity–last year’s defeat of ENDA was, paradoxically, a win for the queer community, or at least the trans community–a federal trans exclusive ENDA would have eviscerated the efforts of localities to institute trans inclusive ones, and thus passing ENDA would have enabled anti-trans discrimination. As bad as prop 8 is, killing it could have left a lot of people out in the cold, and shut the door–now, at least, there’s a chance that when we open that door and come inside, it will be all of us. As I’ve mentioned above, the tactics in use haven’t merely been about only helping middle-class white CLGB folks–they’ve done so by standing on others’ shoulders. It has to stop.

May it stop here.

There was going to be another part of this post, about how we need to get some perspective, about just how big Obama’s win is, how it’s far larger than just the Obama presidency but has implications for the structure of our “democracy” and the role of the Democratic Party; it has implications for who will be nominated in the future and how campaigns will be waged; it has implications for the possibility of the return of intelligent public political discourse which, in all reality, is a far greater necessity for overturning hetero/cis supremacy than defeating prop 8. And, frankly, I think to be focusing on a decision primarily involving white CLBG folks in one state instead of a 1)monumental and historic moment in black history, and 2)potential freedom from the political nightmare of the past 8 years, especially the unmitigated emphasis on wars, wars, and more wars killing almost 100,000 innocent brown people and reinstating known war criminals as the new Afghani puppet government1 and facilitating Wahhabist takeovers of Islamic countries–I think it’s more than a bit racist to be saying that we’re upset about the election.

1: I know, Obama’s in favor of redoubleing the war in Afghanistan, but I think that a potential for change is possible under Obama that would never have been possible under Bush McCain or Palin. (in part due to the whole “intelligent discourse” thing, and, judging from the way he ran his campaign, a much more open and inclusive process and one less prone to the abuses of power so endemic under Bush, e.g. the fake news reports and spying and misuse of security forces…) Maybe I’m overly optimistic, who knows. Regardless, Obama is *less* militaristic than B/C/P have been and would be.

*At the time, I was not ID’ing as a trans woman, though obviously I was seen as such by my assailants (though they’d use different words…), and was generally positioned as such by others in ways that weren’t super cool. But, you know, as of yesterday, I am publicly ID’ing as a woman as well as trans & gender fluid/genderqueer/gender variant. (it was more a matter of realizing my identity had already shifted back than that it changed yesterday, but whatev.)

September 21, 2008

This is a post I made in a different forum in February 2007, that a couple friends of mine told me to repost more publicly. There’s one link that was added for snark.

So, I’m basing this post off of lists available here and here, for context. See also my list written with these concerns in mind.

I often feel like cis privilege checklists really aren’t about privilege. All too often, they reinforce the “those poor transgenders” [sic] mentality and assist in making cis privilege invisible. (Those that are about “non-trans” privilege do so even with the name–there is literally nothing but a not-[oppressed group] to classify this thing which we are supposed to start thinking of as more than not-[oppression].)

Examples:

4) I am not excluded from events which are either explicitly or de facto* men-born-men or women-born-women only. (*basically anything involving nudity)
5) My politics are not questioned based on the choices I make with regard to my body.
6) I don’t have to hear “so have you had THE surgery?” or “oh, so you’re REALLY a [incorrect sex or gender]?” each time I come out to someone.

# I am not denied entrance to appropriate services or events that are segregated by sex.
# My childhood innocence was not interrupted with desperate prayers to a divinity begging to wake up the opposite sex.
# I never grieve about my lost childhood and adolescence because I was born the opposite sex.
# I never worry about potential lovers shifting instantly from amorous to distain and even violence because of my genitals.

See all those “not”‘s and “never”‘s? That’s not explaining privilege or cisgenderness. That’s saying “other people are badly off, but not you.” It does, at some level, and there are some things that it’s very difficult or impossible to explain any other way. But lists written this way end up really keeping the attention off cis people.

Think about the difference between the first item in each set, above, and:
I have unquestioned access to all appropriate sex-segregated facilities.

The two above are more potent at showing a person what the world is like for trans people, and that’s an important part of privilege education. But it fundamentally doesn’t show how the person *benefits* from being cisgender. It shows how an oppressed person is oppressed. Really, all these statements are of the form y = not-x, where x is something that happens to trans folks, and y is the cisgender person’s experience. How do you expect someone who is used to seeing x and only x, to see y from that?

It is more disorienting and confusing to have cisgender privilege talked about in this way. It makes no sense to someone who doesn’t know jack about trans oppression. But, you know, that’s the way privilege is.

My potential lovers expect my genitals to look roughly similar to the way they do, and have accepted that before coming to bed with me.
I expect the privacy of my body to be respected.
I lived my childhood in a gender that felt appropriate for me at the time, and still does.
(or: I lived my childhood in the gender that I want to have lived it in)

September 3, 2008

Though I think all of these distinctions are concepts that are familiar to folks in the anti-oppression world, it’s important to give them names because different forms are frequently confused or conflated. It’s especially problematic when this conflation is used to further marginalize a group of oppressed people, as commonly happens to trans folks, particularly but not exclusively those on a female/feminine spectrum.

External privilege is when other people give you something;Internalized privilege is when you expect it.

Dominance is privilege that is harmful to other people and that no one should have;Support is privilege that everyone should have, and is not on its own harmful to anyone else.

For instance: A habit of attempting to dominate conversations is internalized dominance, and actually being allowed to do so is external dominance; speaking up for oneself is a sign of internalized support, while actually being listened to is external support.

Parallel distinctions exist within oppression:

Subordination is oppression that is harmful to the oppressed person, that denies hir space, resources, self-esteem, etc that everyone should have.Accountability is oppression that (as odd as it sounds) everyone should have, the inability to dominate, oppress, do violence unto others, etc and get away with it.

To continue our earlier example, being conscious of everyone else in a conversation and what they have to say is internalized accountability; external accountability is getting the smackdown if you don’t. Not speaking up, or allowing other people to interrupt/silence you is a sign of internalized subordination; when people actually do it it’s external subordination (especially if calling them on it doesn’t work).

When one fails to act according to one’s external oppression status, either through internalized support/dominance or through having worked at personal growth and healing, frequently the Kyriarchy reasserts its ordering and tells the person in question to get back in hir place–and a rather unpleasant situation happens. When it’s dominance and accountability that are in question, it can be called (an attempt at) holding hir accountable (duh), but I propose to name the other half of this phenomenon insubordination–refusing to obey the rules, demanding inclusion and respect, trying to take or make the space and resources one needs to live well, etc etc.

When one insubordinates, according to the naturalized order of the Kyriarchy, one is “taking up too much space,” being “too demanding,” and “going too far”–precisely because, under that order, one is not worth that space, resource, consideration, etc. This is to be expected.